Big Brother Is Watching And That's O.K.

Big Brother Is Watching And That's O.K. The New Yorker, December 27, 1993 P. 60

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Talk story about computer kiosks being installed by the New York City Department of Probation. Beginning in February, Probation, which supervises the lives of 60,000 convicted criminals--most of them men in their teens and twenties--who haven't been sentenced to serve time in jail, will use several prototype kiosks to monitor nonviolent offenders. Under the current system, probationers are sent questionnaires in the mail and 30 clerks are required to process the data that are returned. Now, thanks to the interactive video, the probationers will come in, identify themselves on a screen, and process their own data. (The computer system will readily and accurately point up no-shows.) Eventually, the money saved--the salaries of the 30 clerks--will go to people with skills to work intensively, theraputically, with young men who are more violent. Ten years from now, most routine government business--renewing a driver's license, paying taxes or fines--may well be handled by kiosks, not clerks. Does this mean that government is not being reinvented so much as retooled--that it's simply growing mechanized, computerized, faceless, affectless? We prefer to think of a city where long lines and simmering vats of rudeness, inefficiency, crankiness, and distractedness have suddenly been zapped away.